Wearing a yellow polo shirt with a Kent State University logo, Tim Bracken joined in the cheers Friday night as the Golden Flashes scored the game’s first touchdown.

The Golden Flashes were competing in Detroit for the Mid-American Conference title against Northern Illinois. With that title and an expected high national ranking, the football team would be honored to receive an invitation to a Bowl Championship Series game.

Eventually, Bracken and other KSU fans at the “watch party,” held in a separate dining room at the Winking Lizard, saw their team rally late, only to lose to the Huskies in two overtimes, 44-37.

Kent State Alumni Association members had waited four decades to have a reason to be so excited about the university’s football team.

“For a long time, football was a joke at Kent State,” said Bracken, a Perry Township resident who was with his two sons, Jarret and Kent.

In 1972, Kent State won the MAC championship and last appeared in a post-season bowl game in what then was known as the Tangerine Bowl.

“I was at the Kent campus when that happened,” Willetta “Willie” Shoemaker, president of the Stark County chapter of the KSU alumni group, said.

Many in the dining room were middle-age adults, but there were some younger adults in the mix.

“We are sure we are going to have 40 at least,” Shoemaker said. “This has been quite a year for us.”

Televisions mounted in the dining room were fixed on the ESPN broadcast from Ford Field. But several of the televisions in the general dining and tavern area inside Winking Lizard also had the KSU game.

The two teams both had an 11-1 record entering the game.

“It’s awesome,” Tina Knauss said. “It is wonderful to see them finally getting some success out of their football program.” Both she and her husband, Kevin Knauss, are Kent State graduates.

But some at the watch party were not KSU graduates, such as Walter Wagor, dean of the Kent State Stark County campus.

While not at the KSU main campus in Portage County, “we share in their pride and excitement, that is for sure,” Wagor said. “I would certainly love to be there. I had important meetings today.”